Hatoyama, Japan Soccer Coach: A Losing Team?

The day before jetting out to South Africa with the Japan squad for the World Cup, team manager Takeshi Okada and a few of the Blue Samurai took time out to present Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama with a signed Japan shirt. In what was conceived as a light-hearted gesture of goodwill, Mr. Okada also presented the PM with one for his wife Miyuki.

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Okada presents Hatoyama with an official Japan T-shirt.

But if there’s one thing neither the PM nor Mr. Okada need, it’s a photo-opportunity with one of the few people in Japan right now who might be just as unpopular as they are.

An embarrassing home defeat to bitter rivals South Korea earlier this week was just the latest in a series of poor results for Japan: that’s left Mr. Okada’s long-standing, lofty prediction that Japan would make it to the last four of the World Cup looking even more precarious than before. Online betting company Paddy Power rates 26 of the 32 teams taking part more likely than Japan to get through to the semi-final stage. Adding apparent insult to injury, Mr. Okada said after Monday’s game that he offered to resign, only to say the following day that, well, he didn’t really mean it. Needless to say, the local press was scathing: “Just when you thought Japan’s World Cup build-up couldn’t go any worse than it has, Takeshi Okada made sure it did,” thundered the Daily Yomiuri, the country’s biggest-selling paper.

Meantime, with an approval rating of just over 19% less than nine months after taking office and growing doubts about his future as PM, Mr. Hatoyama knows a thing or two about local media scorn. Critics say his handling of the controversial plan to relocate the U.S. Marines base at Futenma in Okinawa – ultimately accepting the U.S. proposal, having pledged not to – amounts to a fairly spectacular own goal.

Still, Mr. Hatoyama will likely be cheering the Blue Samurai with gusto during Japan’s crucial opening game against Cameroon June 14. Who knows, if Japan registers its first-ever, feelgood-boosting win in World Cup finals on foreign soil, it could increase the chances of both the PM and Okada still being in a job come the end of the tournament.

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